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Jawpan was made under the auspices of Swinburne University's Centre for New Media. This centre, co ordinated by John Bird is currently in the process of furnishing the digital media industry with many of its most dazzling talents. Innocent and Popa are two of its graduates. Another institution features in Cyberdada work, Empire Ridge, a progressive media lab and commercial publishing company in South Melbourne.
Troy Innocent's ode to the msg high of life in the game arcade of reality is embodied in the bright plastic rendered robot-boy of Otaku. Otaku is a kind of lost child-machine in a world of computer domination. Otaku's bright primary colours and angry/happy facial expression offer him secret advantages over the bizarre world he finds himself in. He can grow wings to help him when a virus to completely transform the world kicks in. Otaku finds out later that he actually wants this, and celebrates the completion of the virus as it mutates everything.
The Otaku are the Japanese equivalent of America's computer geeks. Voracious consumers and collectors of media trivia, this self consciously hermetic subculture of boredom dedicates itself to attending to extraordinary feats of technological expertise.
In Jawpan Otaku is "super deformed" or S.D. An actual category of deliberately caricatured squat representation in Japanese popular culture, S.D. provides a way for the media to reinterpret and renegotiate often ordinarily upright, heroically drawn well known comic book characters and robots. Otaku is a super deformer transformer performer.
Innocent makes his computer creature puppets really work for a living. They fly, they grow wings, and just like computer game pickups, indicate that as a player in the same world you've won something. Achievement and goals are Dart of the experience and when you enter the cyber-film world, you feel as though you've been secretly given some code whose meaning will become clear when you least expect i These strange works are definitely memestrings to infect the 20th Century. The message is "live life celebrating the full on nature ~ media culture because this culture is changing and with it so are we".
Troy Innocent/Elena Popa films look as if the have been factory assembled within some backstreet Taiwanese television advertising computer graphics department and give off a eery manic electric radiance with sharp knowing wit and kick-ass ferocity.
Cyber Dada films seem constantly in the process of offering things up. The meta-reality depicted is the appropriated and renegotiate familiar advertising World For $ale. The media driven cyber utopia, upon closer inspection though, has lost something in the translation, like the jap-lish instruction manual language the films also incorporate. But that's okay. The mutation of culture is what is intended, aimed for and achieved. Cultural mimetic engineering.
Noodle Film is a fake ad for instant noodles which celebrates the timing and intensity of Japanese television commercials. Orientalism on fast forward.
The scouring of Asian groceries has provided Troy Innocent with existing icons and approaches to work which emphasise the problems of communication in international commerce. Suddenly the internationalism of the Macintosh icon and the simply drawn cartoons which demonstrate the three step process for mixing hot water with noodles become the site for a treatise on the value of icon-based living in general. Innocent really wants the world to come together (then fall apart?!) under the sign of the Internationally Understood Symbol, especially if it is overly exaggerated, or (in our eyes) trying just that bit too hard to appeal.
And this is indeed timely. As Brenda Laurel has pointed out, what are required presently are tools within the culture of digital media which address the need for a shared audio visual syntax. Discussing multimedia authoring tools in particular (one of the finest multimedia pieces I have ever seen is Innocent's Idea On!) she told Mondo 2000 magazine that cultures await a technological "Esperanto of the Imagination". A language system where the ability to use a digital syntax of images and sounds gain a global currency like print, sound recording and video.
It is important to know that this group build multiplicity into the whole system of work produced. Themes bounce off the various media used. To see the films is to see bits of performance, bits of writing, bits of scratch built toy models.
The full arsenal of tricks of the commercial design culture this gang trained in has been saved up and used to project the word "Irony" on the world as we know it in bright pink neon. Warhol and Haring are just a few stores down in the same shopping mall.
The Cyberdudes of Dadaland provide their nonsense with pride and with genuine concern that without just the right amount of exposure to intensity, we all might miss out on the future we should all say a happy "hello" to every day.
BODIES AS PROCESS
This film depicts the realm of knowbots, and databases. Here we see a now gradually recurring motif of digestion and body/machine functionality. The Cartesian mind/body "problem" is subject to a sudden digital crash bug. The body is revealed as a process and is extended to representations of fantastic cities, this one called NewSOS. Here the distinction between the minds of urban planners and those of the programmers to wire up the city's computer networks somehow became scrambled, Babel like, resulting in NewSOS.
The bright buildings and fleeting dramatic sunsets of the city of Jawpan and Nano in Newsos are familiar. Those neon lights, endless faux Macintosh icons and even Jawpan's Otaku himself, the durable, transformable, happy space cadet, just give off energy and gleefully so. Cyber Dada S-Thetix are indeed "easy to digest", but the aftertaste is sweet and sickly, with too much sugar.
The themes here are identity, the body and the blurring of the distinction between consumerism and eroticised cannibalism. Gender and Identity and Food are issues closely examined in the film and political Culture of early '90s Californian new youth. The 'slacker' scene over there loves to reuse footage of 1950s ads for food, and of course old porno reworked - see the films of Liz Canning ("Hand Mirror and Brush Set Included") and those of her contemporaries John Montisugu "Der Elvis", "Hippy Porn". There is even a touch of the wry, knowing Sadie Bennings in the camp delivery of the lines....
Bite, chew, swallow, digest and poo your lover while every cell of their physical body receives loving tactile sensations. Every organ will feel and stimulate each piece of your partner as they partially integrate with you. Technodigesto fetishism is a new product for erotic interaction between two or more registered users in cyberspace. Integrating the converging fields of telepresence, nanotechnology and telecommunications with sexuality, meat and erotica into one cohesive take-home set top box solution. Senior Researchers Suku Kabaya and Fuku Shinani present demonstration models of software (humans turned CandyFlesh(tm)) and hardware (with Sugar Suprematist(tm) neural nets coded into ROMS). CandyFlesh(tm) and Sugar Suprematism(tm). On screen interaction with simulated partner will be supplemented by edible physical models. Concept generated by Cyber Dada Version 2.1. Copyright 1993. Intensity and intimacy without death, reintegrate on excretion, how real does it feel ?
That's what Cyber Dada are, in a sense, the Chinese food of Late 20th century urban culture: you eat and eat, and still want more.
Like Dada before them in Europe, Troy, Dale and Elena are interested in being intertextual and multi disciplinary, releasing multimedia,~ performance, film, print and sound at the same time. This has the effect of providing a barricade of meaning to combat the omniprescence of what VNS Matrix call "Big Daddy Mainframe".
If I have any truck with the Cyber Dadaists, it is that their work does little in essence to actually question the legitimacy of the current forms of global media commerce when it is such a good position to do so. I keep wanting the films and the manifestoes to really take the step of exposing the sheer thinness of the media surface, especially now as the full social and cultural impact of the digital era is upon us.
As Andrew Ross points out in his book "Strange Weather" when discussing the "hacker" subculture of the popular culture imagination. For the most part ... the self-defined hacker underground, like many other protocountercultural tendencies, has been restricted to a privileged social milieu, further magnetised by the self understanding of its members that they are the apprentice architects of a future dominated by knowledge, expertise, and "smartness," whether human or digital. Consequently, it is clear that the hacker cyberculture is not a dropout culture; its disaffiliation from a domestic parent culture is often manifest in activities that answer, directly or indirectly, to the legitimate needs of industrial R&D. For example, this hacker culture celebrates high productivity, maverick forms of creative work energy and an obsessive identification with on-line endurance (and endorphin highs) - all qualities that are valorised by the entrepreneurial codes of silicon futurism ... ... Studies of youth subcultures (including those of a privileged middle class formation) have taught us that the political meaning of certain forms of cultural"resistance" is notoriously difficult to read. These meanings are either highly coded or expressed indirectly through media-private peer languages, customized consumer styles, unorthodox leisure patterns, categories of insider knowledge and behaviour that have no fixed or inherent political significance. If cultural studies of this sort have proved anything, it is that the often symbolic, not wholly articulate, expressivity of a youth culture can seldom be translated directly into an articulate political philosophy. Andrew Ross "Strange Weather"
"Hacking away at the Counter Culture'
While partly lamenting a dearth of "articulate political philosophy" as Ross does, checking out the full-on immersive total mutant noodle boy culture of Cyber Dada is nothing if not full on and this is in itself a spinout as long as you get into it.
The original dadaists had little in the way of "articulate political philosophy" when they stood on the stage at the Cabaret Voltair in Zurich while WW1 raged not far away and shouted nonsense (as Cyber Dada themselves and Melbourne's performance/concrete poetry group Arf Arf still do). That was the point. Nonsense ~as the philosophy: ("Jesus is a Sausage")
And neither did the Sex Pistols when "God Save the Queen" and "Pretty Vacant" opened up chasms in the veneer of the Accepted Social Order revealing social horrors and injustices still too ugly for many to confront today. The scale of that Thatcher summer of 1977 made the reality just a little too real to ignore.
Cyber Dada playfulness is itself the age old threat to Order: the use of the fanciest technology to erect highly symbolized erotic colour and pattern poems. These things don't shout their intent via anything as gross and simplistic as content alone but in the contex, and attitude: the libertarian spirit is there, to be sure, but buried under its own meaning structures.
Cyber Dada is codified via the skilful reworking of existing domains image/sound production: glossy ads tv and junk mail, commercial toy and food products, neon, the city in the late afternoon. The subversion comes when you consider that the works are announcing the bankruptcy of traditional med claims to independence and authority
Advertising culture can only real survive in a world of consensual agreed to meaning relations. society's images, sounds, words and pictures become increasing homogenised as data, the availability and expanse of the datascape will make notions like the one way broadcast paradigm, if not obsolete, then diminished in importance. The assumptions of the consumer as; passive entity waiting to receive input from predetermined sites of image and sound production will probably give way to a more decentralised personalised and hence less con trollable media landscape. Here the user of information is a navigator and; hunter gatherer, watching the array o sights and sounds, but actually selecting only a limited amount of material, filtered to suit.
West Art space on April 3rd displayed Cyberdada prints and sculpture, while Techno Digesto Fetishism and Nano in NewSOS played on a monitor. Around the space were hung Dale Nason's collage puppets made from scraps of $2 toys, hospital and computer culture detritus and supermarket packaging materials.
The symmetrical construction of these disarming objects give them a kind of shrine-like feel and structure, complex and detailed, where the colour coordination of things glued to each other plays as much a part in what goes where as the materials used, or the shape and size. These are real city finds ritualised and edited as mutant strains of commercial dna. Montage/collage/garbage. play@being.real.com
Cyber Dada offer a model with which to welcome the proliferation of new meaning systems. It is simple, and it its simplicity highly complex: Play..... Children Walk Through Tall Corridors...
"Our eyes, ears and brains are saturated with information from the moment we are born. Children walk through tall corridors filled with identical products, talking their parents into buying the ones with the cute faces on them. They watch television where they see cartoon characters with big eyes and exaggerated expressions, special effects in movies of morphing humans, they collect toys of cute little girls that smell nice, He-men with gargantuan muscles, man-machines, aliens, UFOs ... All these images filter into our subconscious mind and become part of our reality."
Cyber Dada Manifesto. 1994.
The playfulness which underpined the negationist movements in art since Dada, Situationism, Pop and Punk continue, only now the children are grown up and the toys are the tools of commercial media production and the offshoots of discount toy bins at big supermarkets. So Warhol, with his child-like dumbfounded gaze (cartoon characters with big eyes) would have just said "Ahhhhhmmmm.." and foppishly bought up anything Cyber, like the Otaku ... just to collect it.
Guy Debord and the Situationists also placed great emphasis on the importance of free play, and like another Melbourne Cyber Group, this one 3/3rds female, the "Bureau of Inverse Technology", use the city as the location for works of art, and play as a strategy to renegotiate authority boundaries: the city and the body, signs and the signified. The situationists reworked ads, too, and made their own up to reveal the hidden cracks in the surface of the emerging media landscape of post WW2 France and Europe. This was an socio-economic and media reality which Guy Debord called the "Spectacle". "The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation between people mediated by images..."
At present I feel that Cyber Dada has the potential to better describe the digital spectacle as a very real social relation, one which increasingly defines the terms and conditions of commercial and personal identity.
Though keen to avoid the victim model traditional left politics has employed to describe relations between individuals and technology, I think any critique of the structures of commercial meaning industries as we experience them needs to take into account the fact that technology is empowering to those who understand these relations. Free up the technology, or encourage access and then experimentation, and you'll get the critique. As Donna Haraway points out, you have to take the battle to the border where technology serves to separate us.
Free play has always been a good antidote to the sternest of hierarchies, as the Vietnam War, the Punk movement and Paris 1968 (due largely to the work of the Situationists) attest.
As Debord wrote in "Society of the Spectacle": "Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it, surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it. The critical position later elaborated by the Situationists has shown that the suppression and the realisation of art (are) inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art."
What Debord is advocating, Troy Innocent proclaims. At the beginning of his Mac Based interactive Idea>On! a voice says: "We go beyond".
I'm sure Duchamp would have loved to eat a bowl of Yum Yum with these mutants of the moment. Cyber Dada are kind of true to the namesake of the early 20th Century Zurich/Paris/Berlin movement which in its first WW1 incarnation were silly and playful. The same group soon became political and dangerous though as the climate changed. I wonder if this will be the next phase of the cyber movement when our own Melbourne Weimar Kennetism - gives way to something even more worthy of swift overthrow?
References
Jas Morgan, Mondo 2000 magazine issue # 7, 1992. Interview: "Brenda Laurel, Lizard Queen"
Donna Haraway, Simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, New York, Rutledge, 1991.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la socidy du speaacle English. Comments on the society of the spectacle, London, Verso, 1990.